School of Education

A successful collaboration between the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) Special Interest Group 24 - Researcher Education and Careers and Innovations in Education and Teaching International (IETI) culminated in the publication of 14 academic articles from 46 researchers, 25 universities and 14 countries across the globe.

IETI, the flagship journal of the Staff and Educational Development Association, is an international Q1 journal that focuses on higher education (HE) innovation and effective learning and teaching practices.

In the last two years, Dr Dely L Elliot, a member of staff from the School of Education, led a team of guest editors comprising Dr Inge van der Weijden (Leiden University), Professor Søren Bengtsen and Dr Hatice Nuriler (both of Aarhus University) in guest editing the IETI Special Issue on the theme: ‘Fostering researcher independence: What are the educational and professional development consequences in the doctoral context?

Two of the articles in this Special Issue were led by staff members from the School of Education:

• Turning the spotlight on Intellectual Humility: A potentially novel approach to fostering doctoral development (and researcher independence). This was written by Dr Dely L Elliot (University of Glasgow), Dr Ruth M Albertyn (Stellenbosch University) and Associate Professor Yusuke Sakurai (Hiroshima University).
• Stages of competence in doctoral researcher development: Insights from a collective autoethnographic study of Journal Club participation. This was led by Dr Kara Makara, a group of postgraduate researchers from the School of Education including Chenyao Duan, Karen Gordon, Fanzhu Meng, Zhihan Wu, Jin Yu, Chengli Zhai, and Dr Dely L Elliot.

Should you be interested in finding out more about how this Special Issue project started as well as getting further details on each article, please take a look at the Editorial.

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First published: 7 September 2026